Bill Clinton's former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich talked about creating a third party if the Democratic Party does not move in a more progressive direction.“The Democratic Party can no longer be the same; it has been repudiated,” Reich said on a conference call with members from the progressive grassroots group Democracy for America. “This has been a huge refutation of establishment politics, and the political organization has got to be changed. … If the Democratic Party can’t do it, we’ll do it through a third party.”
The Democratic Party is in an all-out civil war between the more progressive wing of the party and the more corporate wing of the party.
Some in the party are blaming progressives who supported Bernie Sanders for refusing to rally behind Hillary Clinton.
“The Sanders people should be mad at themselves,” said one well-connected Democratic strategist to the Hill. “If they had come out to vote, Donald Trump wouldn’t be president.”
Others say that the corporate wing of the party has to be purged to appeal to more working-class voters.
“Everybody in the building needs to be fired immediately,” Cenk Uygur, the host of the progressive political commentary show The Young Turks, told the Hill.
It is unknown who will lead the Democratic Party as the party looks forward to the midterm elections in 2018 and then the 2020 presidential election. But one thing Democrats agree on is that they were ineffective at turning out older, working-class voters in states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
“There were people who felt left out of the economy over the last eight years, who were never able to get back on their feet–blue collar men and women,” former Sen. Ken Salazar (D-Colo.) said. “Donald Trump was able to capture them in terms of emotion and sentiment.”